Esri today announced that the City and County of Honolulu was awarded one of the company’s annual Making a Difference Awards. Honolulu Mayor Peter Carlisle was honored for his administration’s ground-breaking use of geographic information systems (GIS) in the city’s urban planning efforts.
Mayor Carlisle and his administration used GIS to visualize the importance of investing in a state-of-the-art, metro rail transit system. GIS was able to show the city’s suburban sprawl and the efficiency that would result from the implementation of the Honolulu transit project. The project was accepted by the Federal Transportation Administration (FTA) at the end of 2011, and the final design is scheduled to be completed by the fall of 2012.
“By demonstrating such forward thinking in the area of geodesign, it is our pleasure to present this award to Mayor Carlisle and his administration,” said Jack Dangermond, Esri president. “Mayor Carlisle’s support of GIS technology will help the City and County of Honolulu improve its public transit system, alleviate congestion and improve the quality of life for its residents and visitors.”
The Esri Making a Difference awards were presented during the conference’s plenary session in front of an audience of approximately 15,000 GIS professionals from around the world. The award honors people or organizations, who have used GIS to carry out meaningful change in the world. Recipients use GIS as a framework to understand problems and successfully meet important challenges. They are leaders that value collaboration and have a sense of shared responsibility for society or the environment.
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Since 1969, Esri has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS technology, Esri software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. Esri applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world’s mapping and spatial analysis. Esri is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at esri.com/news.
